☂️-

… for no good reason.

… because of datacenters that don’t exist for demand that isn’t there.

i have a feeling those kind of people would blame “dei” regardless.

i was aware of coreboot and opensil, but i figure they are not ready for something like this yet?

they would solve the hardest part. nowadays everything lives under pci express and a lot is orchestrated by the cpu/pch, which is the responsibility of… firmware to initialize. deciphering and reverse engineering this process would not be trivial at all.

i know some smaller controllers have firmware baked in, and some are on an outside flash chip that may or may not be able to be read and copied. some may have good documentation available and even reference implementations you might see repeated on different boards. some others might be easy to obtain. memory is about signal integrity, not firmware.

but yeah, i don’t think it would be easy (or possible at all) to have firmware be all open. i would bet there are clauses in some of their licensing officially forbidding us of all of this.

this is something i think regularly about doing.

what stops us from having an open source motherboard for a modern-ish platform, like am3/am4/am5? i know firmware can be a pain, but if the chinese manufacturers can do it somehow we could too.

the motherboard is usually the component that’s the most fragile in a machine without a gpu, thus what makes most sense to be open and repairable. plus not having to rely on the goodwill of manufacturers to actually sell their shit to us.